Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard and the Crimes of History

This essay reconsiders the place of 1830s fiction in British literary history by investigating the cultural fascination in the period with criminal heroes and the urban underworld. Reading William Harrison Ainsworth's novel Jack Sheppard, the essay argues that this text and the Newgate school to which it belongs help us to reassess the relevance of minor popular genres to the novel's transformations across the nineteenth century, and to interrogate the forms of cultural work that this fiction undertakes.